Inkjet printers are known as one type of liquid ejecting apparatus that ejects liquid toward a medium. The inkjet printer is configured so as to perform printing by ejecting ink, as the liquid, onto a medium such as paper. Recent-type inkjet printers are provided with a print function known as “borderless printing”. “Borderless printing” refers to a printing method in which ink is applied up to the very edge of the medium to perform printing such that no blank space is formed on the medium. The ink that is ejected up to the very edge of the medium may miss the medium due to positional misalignment of the medium, for example. Thus, such printers are provided with a recovery section for recovering the ink that has been discarded. The recovery section may, for example, be provided with an absorbing material that is configured so as to absorb the ink that has missed the medium, such as a sponge, and the ink that is recovered is absorbed by the absorbing material and held therein.
However, such “borderless” printing has the following problems: among the inks that are ejected, there are types that have low permeability or that easily solidify, for example. When such ink misses the medium during “borderless” printing and reaches the top of the absorbing material of the ink recovery part, there is a possibility that the ink will not easily permeate into the absorbing material but instead remain as it is on the surface. In such a case, if ink is subsequently discarded on top of the remaining ink and remains thereon without readily permeating, the problem of a continuing accumulation of ink on the absorbing material arises. When ink accumulates and is piled up in this manner, discarded ink sequentially piles up on the absorbing material, and may eventually cause problems such as soiling of the printing medium and adversely affecting the movement of the head. Particularly, in recent years, printing technology has been proposed that uses special reacting liquids to accelerate coagulation of the ink to improve color saturation in order to achieve increased image quality. If such reacting liquids are used, then coagulation of the ink continues, and the accumulation amount may further increase. This has been a problem.
The present invention has been made in light of the foregoing issues, and it is an object thereof to reduce the occurrence of problems such as build up of liquid such as ink that has reached a region outside the medium during, for example, “borderless printing”.